In Dead Horse Point, We are Alone
BY JAI HAMID BASHIR
2021 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry – Finalist
and you are telling me your new father
is being deported. Riding past rivers
unrushed by summer. There, sober and brilliant,
we find quail nests. Little bones like those once in Bogotá.
We find eggs in open tender parenthesis. Look. This is how
our world has been this fragile,
how we are cut from the navel and scattered. Desert water
evaporates before it ever wets Lahori lines
of orange trees, the fruit that taught how to slice
our world. Naranja or Naarangi is a tart tautology.
Rhyming with nothing in America. Vibrating echo
in both Spanish and Hindi. Naarangi
travels from India to Spain, was handed
in ravished fists, like the Earth itself by Marco Polo
to hungry monarchs. Crystallized and jeweled
arancia in Sicily. Carried in sweetened braids
of a small bride, or the dead-eyed unanimal
glint of guns, as tangy naranja
into the New World. Silently
“j” is left out there hanging
from its hook. It was half- night. Whispering
midnight is aadhi-raat. We leaned again on
silver beams of a motorcycle sweetly christened,
El Burro. Circling darkened eyes, tying
hammocks from Aspen trees, sewn out and in
air eddies of hummingbirds.
Covered in pine needles, we pointed
singing names back in English. In Spanish.
In Hindi. How can we say Father? Walls?
Together? Escape? Sloughed skin
of a rattlesnake breaks through
and under chains. The skin bleached
white in silverhurry of moon’s or chandini’s
reflection. A spiral worn soft as the hand-
me-downs of our starving brown
grandmothers: Abuela and Nani across
latitudes who once ate orange
out of oranges, down to smiles
of slithering pulp and rind.
Rinsing my hands under metallic tips
of common stars —
if we were to do it again, ride and die again
with you, El Burro out there at half-night, this time
ride and die again, in the warm breath
of our tent, I’d say
salam and hold you so
with the American choreography
of a pigskin flying
to be caught
by a child, whose real father,
like yours, rode and died
and only returned
once.
Elegy for a Newborn Mariner
BY JAI HAMID BASHIR
2021 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry – Finalist
A floatless litter is on the shore.
The bones of an unknown womb.
And in the night and after the rain,
from a car mirror I witness and stop
in the same young desire that determines
a stranger’s nakedness feels warmer
than our own flesh. I’ve held out for the dead
to become less dead, and each year I’ve found
more assuring sugar that ferments the soft coil
and polaroid of moth wings. You the light
that arrives in fescues to direct me to reefs
to teach in tides femur-high how to look
for sea treasure and signs. Now how blue
and still the lone island of memory that calls me
to the ocean to think of your birth, our Father
holding you after the umbilical cord, a line,
that made you live, and then unlive, was untangled
by nurses around your neck like a fishing line.
You who could have been my brother.
Here each reminder of life itself, here is the water:
as if watching a baby’s body move
under blankets. All dog-paddles
of white waves riding along
the fringe of the frozen ocean.
I’m in the shore’s narrowed alley touching
the Himalayas calcified, another carbonate
skeleton. The coral looks like a brain,
suspended in this impossible shape,
marbled in water’s choreographies,
and in each discovery, and each polyp
of this magnitude, just the neurobrine
that salts the inside fever of my aging,
soft head and each thought of you
moonwater, and safe, and half-dark.
Note: “In Dead Horse Point, We are Alone” previously appeared in The American Poetry Review. We are grateful to reprint this poem as part of Jai Hamid Bashir’s Djanikian Scholars Finalist portfolio.